>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia it's theCube covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, this is theCube's coverage of AnsibleFest 2019, here in Atlanta Georgia, I'm Stu Miniman, real excited to be at this event for the first time, getting to talk to a number of the practitioners, talking to some of the executives, and to give us a slightly different angle on it, we're really going to talk about education and what's happening in this space. And joining me, first time guest on the program, Carlos Caicedo, who is an associate professor at Syracuse University. Carlos thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so Syracuse, the snow belt hasn't hit yet for 2019 up your neck of the woods, - [Carlos] Yeah. >> but you know tell us a bit about what you know, you do, the programs you work on, and then we'll get into how much automation is a piece of that. >> Okay, so I'm professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and two years ago, we decided to launch a new masters degree program on enterprise data systems that focuses on cloud technologies, automation, scripting and all that's required now a days to manage and work with the infrastructure that data centric enterprises need now a days. Basically we saw this need because the traditional way of working with infrastructure, from the command line interface wasn't going to cut it anymore. You need to work with scale, new concepts, APIs, git, continualization, virtualization. So we needed to create a program that replace our traditional networking program and modernize it and bring it up to speed with what's currently happening in the industry. >> I think that's great, you know we talk about what is, how do we close the gap between what, you know, business needs, what skillsets are needed, and what's coming out of university. You know for a long time, it was like okay, let's get everybody in computer sciences and do that, but you know, whatever programming language you learn today, it's like oh boy, it seems to change and be out of date there, and if you talk about a masters degree, in IT we're working with, you know, how does the technology and the business, how do they work together. - [Carlos] Yeah. So I have to imagine that this, that masters level helps prepare your students to kind of live in that world. >> Yes, we're a bit different than what you would call a traditional network engineering degree, which focuses a lot on the technology. We imbed or try to give our students also a business perspective so they learn management, information management, or management concepts for information professionals, information policy concepts, so you understand the business side, but then we also imbed a lot of technology components into the curriculum. So the idea is to have this kind of multi-disciplinary hybrid professional, that understands that whatever is being worked at the infrastructural level needs to support the goals of the business and can walk those worlds, be a good participant in teams. Collaboration is the key now a days as we've seen. >> So Carlos, what prerequisites do your students have to have coming in, I mean do they need to be certified on certain network gear or you know what do they need to understand, and what do you give them that might be different than what they would have gotten out in industry? >> Well, preferably, students that come in should have some knowledge of networking the TCP IP stack, basically, what routing an IP address is, and from there on they'll see courses on advanced networking, scripting, cloud management, cloud architecture, and so forth, and plus the business side as I mentioned, to get them prepared for the real world. >> Okay, one of the things that was, you know, greatly talked about here is really that evolution of automation. You know how do we move it from being a just you know, tactical. One of the keynotes speakers yesterday talked about the whack-a-mole I'm going to solve all of these little problems to a more strategic view. How have you been seeing in, how does the evolution of automation impact your curriculum? >> Well, that's a great question. So the idea is not to have automation for the sake of automation. Like you said we need the business focus and whoever is participating in a team and moving the automation story forward needs to be conscious that the end goal is to support business. However, in terms of how it has impacted our curriculum, we embedded automation in several of our courses because that's the way to go in the future, you can't just cut it with, you know, a device by device kind of approach. So everything now a days changes too quickly and the demands for businesses to respond to these changes require a quick turnaround for whatever the infrastructure needs to provide to support the business. So we need to build professionals that understand this and can apply innovation to their benefit and to the benefit of their enterprise. >> Now one of the interesting conversations we've had this week is that the software, the technology, is actually hoping to drive some of the collaboration and communication between groups and roles. How much of that, does that get touched on at all, you know when you talk about working with the business and doing all that? >> Yes, so we kind of build on team based assignments and labs just to get students to understand they're going to have to be part of a team. And you might have people that speak a different language than you or at a different level than you. Let's say more business-oriented, more process-oriented, more technology-oriented but you have to be, well at least a professional would prefer, you have to be that glue that keeps the team cohesive and working together to a common goal. So yeah, collaboration is key and we've seen that in this event, it's all about changing the culture and having this positive approach towards being collaborative. And we're hoping that we're building professionals that from day one understand this and can be part of a team. >> All right, so you talk about that collaboration, I'm curious, in higher education, you know, how is what you're doing impacting your peers, how do you learn from both your peers and education as well as in industry? >> Well, so, at least at our university we have a culture of collaboration between different departments and disciplines. We might work a lot with engineering, we might work a lot with the business school, law school. So again, to bring this interdisciplinary knowledge to students. We also like to reach out to industry and build partnerships, build bridges so that we can leverage some of the resources they have you know to promote or educate people on their products, but also to get students to actually be very hands on and work with things that are out there in the real world. So the idea is that they can speak the same language as many professionals that are already out there. >> Can you speak to you know, Red Hat's participation, how are they partnering and enabling what your mission is? >> So I've been using Ansible in several of my courses and so we have a scripting course, just to mention one, where we do a lot of modules on Ansible and again to understand this concept of mass automation, that automation is the key element for moving infrastructure and having infrastructure deliver goals in the future. So we partner in such that we get to use their products in an easy way and we keep on building new bridges to use more of their products. Now with the announcement of the automation platform, I really want to dig into that and start building new labs for students on that platform. >> Stu: Okay so sounds like you're excited by the announcement. - Oh yeah. >> Anything particular that you know caught your eye on that? It sounds like, you know, the networking pieces with collections seems like something that might be useful. >> Yes, so, well being an information school we're big on data right, so now you have the story of being able to automate a device or a service level, putting that into Ansible tower, doing access control, monitoring and then collecting statistics based on that. Monitoring the performance of your playbooks, monitoring the performance of your automation tasks. So having that data, that analytic side for example, is quite exciting for an information school because we might get some ideas as to how to leverage that in the future. >> So I'm wondering if you could share kind of, you know, what your students think about automation in general. You know if you talk about just the general workforce, you know, over the years there's sometimes that fear oh the robots and the automations are going to takeover you know, what I'm doing, you know, is there any of that fear from the generation, or does working with the technology, you know, help enable what they're looking to do? >> Well, it's definitely kind of a mixed bag. So until students get introduced to tools like Ansible, they do have some fear that well now it's like one person can do the work of 20 or 30 people. But once they understand the story of, you know, tools like Ansible, they change their focus. I had two students at the AnsibleFest last year and they were amazed about looking at the way that many enterprises are using automation. So it's not just about taking out these mundane tasks that network managers have to do, it's getting the time to actually innovate, to be creative, get rid of those tasks that occupy time but are not really important, minimum tasks to get the ship moving along, but then build on top of that to create new products and services. >> It's interesting if you look at the research on it, you know, information technology often has not had the efficiency increases of kind of worker productivity that you might expect and definitely not to the point that it's going to be, you know, massive, you know, job, you know, killing of jobs, you know, hopefully, you know, when we talk to some of the people here it should improve your job satisfaction, hopefully get rid of some of those oh my gosh I got to spend, you know, every fifth weekend, you know, working on this and we can automate some of those away, but yeah there's that disconnect between the reality and, you know, what the technology's actually doing. >> Yes, yeah you don't want to be putting fires every weekend or everyday. And you want to bring additional, how you do to the enterprise and I think that's what automation allows in a big way. >> Great so Carlos you've been to AnsibleFest before, give us your impression so far, the event this week and some of the key things that you, you know, have been or are looking to take away from AnsibleFest 2019. >> Well as I mentioned before, the automation platform definitely want to look into that. I think the way that people are talking about collaboration around automation is very important. I think that kind of validates the team based focus and approach to some of our assignments at least at the program level. Also, I think that the way that companies are now telling their stories of automation. It's pretty neat, I hope to bring some of them into the curriculum. I just saw one from these guys from New Zealand, that they had come, they had videos as to how they implemented some big massive automation and tasks. That was pretty interesting. So hopefully I get to take some of what I've learned here into the curriculum. >> And you know, just a final thing, you know, how prevalent are these, you know, curriculums of automation throughout the country, you know, any data on that? >> Well that's a good question, so basically I would split the university so the program's like in three groups. So you have one group that's developing programs mostly on the network engineering side, very very technical. Other group that probably hasn't really catched on the evolution of networking and probably just teaching networking in the same traditional manner, you know, hoping to get people prepared for cisco certification, certifications of other types, very static, traditional network construction. And then another group which would be kind of in the middle where it's not fully about the technology, it's also about the business and how much you concentrate on both sides can, is where we can distinguish each of these programs. So, besides us I think there are a couple smaller universities that are also preparing these transitions. It's a hard thing to do because things change so quickly and it's hard for faculty to keep up and we want to deliver up to date content to students and it's extremely difficult. My content changes by at least a third from year to year, so I have prepare new slides, new assignments, new labs, get more infrastructure. It's very exciting, but also very challenging and so, we hope that our students are built to embrace change, prepare for it and not oppose it. >> I think it's a great mission, you know, but not only does you know, the technology and the business need to work close together but we know that the only constant in our industry is change. - [Carlos] Yes. So being prepared for, as a workforce, to be able to, you know, live in that and thrive in that environment is so critically important. Carlos, thank you so much for sharing with us, you know, the curriculum at Syracuse and, you know, we look forward to catching up with you in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right we'll be back with lots more coverage, I'm Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house, it's our two days live coverage here from AnsibleFest 2019. Atlanta, thanks for watching theCube.

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. This is the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost of the week is John farrier. And this is the cube insights where we share our independent analysis, break down what we're hearing from the community, what we've learned from all of our interviews. John, uh, you know, we knew community would be a big portion of what we did here. Uh, culture and collaboration were things that we talked a lot about that wasn't necessarily what I thought I would be hearing. Uh, you've been talking a lot about how observability and automation are the, the huge wave. We've seen, you know, acquisitions, we've seen IPOs, we've seen investments. So, you know, your, your, your take here as we're wrapping up. Sure, sure. Last to, um, as we said in our opening in the big scene here has been automation for all that's Ansible's kind of rap because they're, you know, they're announcing their main news ants, full automation platform. >>So that's the big news. But the bottom line is where this emerged from was configuration management and supple started out as a small little project that's solved a very specific problem. It solved configuring devices and all the automation around, you know, opening up ports and things that that were important beyond the basic static routing, the old web one. Dot. O web 2.0 model. And it grew into a software abstraction layer for automating because a lot of that stuff, the mundane tasks in configuring networks and servers frankly were boring and redundant. Everyone hated them patches. So easy ground to automate. And I think, um, it's evolved a lot into dev ops because with the cloud scale more devices, just because software's defining everything, it doesn't mean servers go away. So we know that is more servers is more storage, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, it's cloud operations. >>So automation I think, and I'm, my prediction is is that automation will be as big of a category as observability was. And remember we kinda missed observability we saw it as important. We've covered all those companies, but especially in network management on steroids with the cloud. But look what happened. Multiple companies when public big companies getting sold for billions of dollars, a lot of M and a activity observability is the most, one of the most important areas of cloud 2.0 it's not just some white space around network management. The data is super important. I think automation is going to grow into a highly competitive, highly relevant in the lucrative marketplace for companies and I think Ansible is in pole position to capture that with red hat and now red hat part of IBM. I think automation is going to be very big land grab. It's going to be where the value is created. >>I think observability and automation are going to go hand in hand and I think AI and data, those are the things programming infrastructure revolve around those two spheres. I think it is going to be super important. I think that's why the cube is here. We smelled it out, we sniffing it and we can see. We can touch it and the community here, they're doing it. They're there actually have proof points. Yup. These, this community is demonstrating that the process is going to be more efficient. The technology works and the people are transforming and that is a key piece with automation. People can work on other things and it's certainly changing the game. So all three aspects of digital transformation are in lockstep and, and, and, and expanding rapidly. >>Yeah. John, I would expect nothing less than a bold prediction from you on this space. You know, it's only $150 million acquisition, which is really small compared to a lot of the acquisitions that we see these as heck. You know, red hat Ansible didn't get talked about all that much when you know, IBM went and spent over $30 billion for red hat. But absolutely automation is so important that infrastructure is code movement that we've been tracking for quite a long time helps enable automation across the entire stack. A lot of discussion this week here, networking and security, two areas that we know need to make progress and we need to have, you know, less errors. We need to be able to make changes faster and cloud. We just as in the infrastructure space, that configuration management, we need to be able to simplify things. Absolutely. One of the things that will slow down the growth of cloud is that if we can't simplify those environments, so the same type of tooling and where Ansible is trying to, you know, span between the traditional environments and the cloud is to get this working in the containerization cloud native Kubernetes world that we're living in. >>Yeah, and it's still, you're right on, I mean this is the analysis and that it's spot on. I think one of the nuances in the industry landscape is a, when red hat got acquired by IBM for a massive amount of money, everyone's scratching their heads. But if you think about what red hat has done and you know I'm a real big fan of red hat, you are too. They're smart. They make great acquisitions, Ansible, not a big payout. They had coral West, they, they got open shifts there. They're the decouple their operating systems people. They get the notion of systems architecture. I think red hat is executed brilliantly in that systems mindset, which is perfect for cloud computing. I think Arvin Krishna at IBM really understood the impact of red hat and when I talked to him at red hat summit two years ago, right before the acquisition, he had the twinkle in his eye when I asked him about red at, because you can see them connecting the dots. Red hat brings a lot to the table and if IBM doesn't screw up red hat, then they're going to do well and we talk about red hat not screwing up Ansible and they didn't. Now part of it, if IBM doesn't screw up the red hat acquisition, let red hat bring that systems mindset in. I think IBM could use red has a beautiful way to bring a systems architecture into cloud, cloud native and really take a lot of territory down these new cloud native apps. >>John F automation is a force multiplier for customers and Ansible has that capability to be a force multiplier for red hat. When you look at the ecosystem they're building out here, the Ansible automation platform really helps it get customers more in lock steps. So you know, I was talking to the people and said, Oh, you know, AWS has an update. Oh we need to roll the entire core and put out another version. I can't wait for that. I need to be able to decouple the partner activity, which by the way, they talked about how the disk project is the six most popular in get hub decoupling collections might actually put them lower on the on the list, but that's okay because they're solving real customer problems. And it's interesting, John, we talk about the ecosystem here. One of, there's only a couple of other companies other than red hat that can commit without having to go through approval. Microsoft is one of them. So you talk about the, the collaboration, the ecosystem here where this can be, >>let's do the, the thing about Ansible is that it's a double edged sword. There value is also an Achilles heel. And one of the critical analysis that I have is, is that they're not broad enough yet. On and there and there. I won't say misunderstood the customers here in the community, they totally get it. Everyone here loves Ansible. The problem is is that in the global landscape of the industry, they're tiny red hat needs to bring this out faster. I think IBM has to get animal out there faster because they have all the elements kind of popping right now. You got community, very strong customer base, loyal and dynamic. You got champions developing. That's classic sign of success. They got a great product, perfectly fit for this glue layer, this integration layer, you know, below containers and maybe you can even sitting above containers depending on how you look at it. And then finally the ecosystem of partners. Not yet fully robust, but all the names are here. Microsoft, Cisco net app F five kind of feels like VMworld on a small scale. They have to up level it. I think that's the critical problem I see with with these guys is that it's almost too good and too small. >>Yeah. Uh, you know, when I look back at when red hat made the acquisition, there were a handful of companies, most of them embracing open source as to which configuration management tool you're going to do. Ansible did well against them and red hat helped make them the category leader in this space. There is a different competitive landscape today. Just public cloud. You know, Ansible can help, but there's some customers that would be like, Oh, I've got different tooling and it doesn't fit into what I'm doing today. So there's some different competitors in the landscape and we know John, every customer we've talked to, they've got a lot of tools. So how does Ansible get mind share inside the company? They had some great stories that we heard both on the Q from like ING and the Southern company as well as in the keynotes from JP Morgan where they're scaling out, they're building playbooks, they're doing this, but you know, this is not, you know, it's not just push a button to get all of this rolled out. >>The IBM marketing should help here. And if I'm, you know, um, uh, the marketing team at IBM, I'd be like all over this because this is a, a game changer because this could be a digital transformation ingredient. The people equation. The problem is, is that again, IBM to embrace this and Ansible has that glue layer integration. This could be great. Now the benefit to them, I think they're tailwind is they can solve a lot of problems. One nuance from the show that I learned was, okay, configuration management, dev ops, great. The network automation is looking good. Security is a huge opportunity because if you think about the basic blocking and tackling patches, configuration, misconfigurations, automation plays perfect role. So to get beachhead in the enterprise as an extraction layer is to own and dominate those basics. Because think about the big hacks. Capitol one, misconfigured firewall to an S three bucket, that wasn't Amazon's fault, but the data on Amazon, this is automation can solve a lot of these problems, patches, malware, vulnerabilities, the adversaries are going to be all over that. >>So I think the security piece, huge upside position, Ansible and red hat as an abstraction layer to solve those basic problems rather than overselling it could be a great strategy. I think they're doing a good job with that. Uh, it totally, you know, built on simplicity and modularity. Uh, this, this tooling is something that it can sit lots of places in the organization, uh, and help that cultural communication. Uh, I was a bit critical of, uh, you know, enterprise collaboration, uh, that, that top down push that you'd get. Um, but here, you know, you've got a tool that uh, as we, we just had on our final interview with, uh, Pirog, you know, developers, they didn't build this for developers, but developers are embracing it. The infrastructure people are embracing it. It gives a sense of some why we here to why we're here is I think Ansible fast as a community event, which we love. >>But two, I think this is early, you know, days in the Canadian, the coal mine and saying that the Ansible formula for automation is going to be a growth year. That's my prediction. And we have data to back it up. If you look at our our community and the folks out in the cube alumni know no that when we reach out to them and get some data. But here's what supports why I think the automation thing with Ansible and red hat is relevant because it applies what we just talked about. The number one thing that came back from the community stew was focused efforts on better results. Automation from time efficiency days, hours to minutes check. Security is absolutely a top driver for automation. That's a tailwind. The job satisfaction issue is not like a marketing feel. Good thing. People actually liked their jobs when they have to, don't have to come in on the weekends. >>So this automation does align with that. And finally infrastructure and developers re-skilling with new capabilities and new things. Is it just an uplift? So those are the drivers driving the automation. That's why RPA is so hot and this is a critical foundation in my opinion. So you know Ansible's is the leading the wave here in this new automation wave and I think it's going to be a big part because it's controlling the plumbing. Yeah, John wanted the machinery. Johnny is the, the, the future of work. We know that automation is going to be hugely important. You mentioned >>RPA, a huge one. I had an interview with the associate professor from Syracuse university or they're teaching this to education. It's not just, Oh Hey you got to go learn coding and learn this programming language. No, we need to have that. That combination of the business understanding and the technology and automation can sit right at that intersection. What's your big learning point? What did you take away? Yeah, so it is, it's that point here that this is not just to some, you know, cool little tool on the side. This is something you John, we've talked at many shows. Software can actually be a unifying factor inside companies to help build platforms and for customers to help them collaborate and work together. This a tool like Ansible isn't just something that is done tactically but strategically, you know, gets everyone on the same page enables that collaboration isn't just another channel of you know, some other thing that a, I don't want to have to deal with it. >>It helps me get my job better. Increases that job satisfaction. That's so hugely important as to if you think about the digital transformation form of the people, process technology, how many interviews have we done, how many interviews have we done, a companies we've talked to where they have the great product and on the process side to address the process. They have the tech but they fail on the people side. It's the cultural adoption, it's the, it's the real enablement and I think Ansible's challenge is to take the platform, the capabilities of their, of their, of their software, launch the platform and create value because if they're not enabling value out of the platform that does not cross check with what platforms are supposed to do, which is create value. And John, the thing I want to look for when we come back to this show next year is how much are they allowing customers delivered through data? >>When we heard from their engineering division here, okay, the platforms, the first piece, but how do I measure internally and how do I measure against our peers? We know that that people want to have, there's so much information out there. How am I doing? Am I, where am I on my the five, five step progression and adoption of automation and you know, Hey, am I doing good against my competition or are they smoking me? Well? That's the metrics with the insight piece and tying it to the rail. Now people can say, look, I just saved a bunch of money. I saved some time. That's the business impact and I think you know when you have the KPIs and you had the analysts to back it up, good things will happen. Students been great. All right, John, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We got lot more here toward the second half of 2019 a big thanks to the whole community for of course watching this here at antelopes Fest. Check out the cube.net for all the upcoming shows. Thank you to our whole production team and to our hosts. Red hat for giving this beautiful set right in the middle of the show. And thanks as always for watching the cube.